Personally, I’ve been listening to Christmas music since before Halloween. When it comes to that most amazing of holidays, I basically never stopped being five years old. I love everything about it and start counting down the hours in mid-September, even though it feels like the magic day will never get here. As someone who is festive for that long, I need a lot of Christmas music to get me through the months, and so I give you a countdown of the five all-time greatest Christmas albums.

5. Pretty Paper
Willie Nelson’s career has gone through several phases and stages (it’s funny because that is his album HO HO HO!). He wrote hits for other people, he became an “outlaw” and wrote hits for himself, and then he decided to hell with all that writing, he’d just become an unparalleled interpreter of other people’s songs. Beginning with his Stardust album, Willie showed that his voice and his style of playing could create spectacular versions of classic songs, and this Christmas album—released in the late seventies at the peak of this period in his career—is a shining example of his skills in this field. Instead of the by-the-numbers recordings that plague so many artists’ Christmas songs, Willie makes each tune here his own. Songs like “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and “Blue Christmas” are given a pleasant shuffle and stamped with Willie’s trademark just-behind-the-beat delivery. You don’t have to be a country fan to get in the Christmas mood with this record; Willie’s unique voice and unsurpassed talents make for an album everyone can enjoy.

4. Elvis’ Christmas Album
A lot of times, a Christmas album is something that’s treated as separate from the rest of an artist’s catalogue and is judged by different standards. Not so with this one. In fact, Elvis’ Christmas Album may well be the absolute best album the King—who did his best recording at a time when singles, not long players, were artists’ main focus—ever made. It contains some of the most sophisticated vocal work Elvis had yet achieved at that point in his career, a fact made all the more impressive when you consider that the whole album was recorded over a mere three days. There’s a good mix of the secular and the sacred here, including four gospel numbers that aren’t specifically Christmas tunes but are certainly in keeping with the religious spirit of the holiday. And, as wiser men than I have noted, it just wouldn’t be Elvis without a few gospel tracks. The album generated some notoriety upon its release in 1957 due to Irving Berlin’s outrage that a young upstart like Elvis Presley would have the audacity to record “White Christmas.” While his version of the song certainly has more swing to it than the performance made famous by Der Bingle, it’s in no way diminishing to the feel and spirit of the tune. Fortunately, the complaints of a crusty old songwriter did nothing to hurt either the album’s success or its quality. Elvis’ Christmas Album is rightfully deserving of its classic status.

3. A Charlie Brown Christmas
Now that’s jazzy! But fear not, you needn’t be a “hep cat” jazz fan to “dig” the music on “this” album. You needn’t even be a fan of the Charlie Brown Christmas cartoon, if there could possibly exist someone who is not a fan of that wonderful thing. What the Vince Guaraldi Trio does here is create distinctly jazz arrangements of Christmas favorites without ever having them descend into 35 minutes of noodling as so often happens in this genre. Instead, each performance is tight but swinging, recognizable but still improvisational—in a word, excellent. These instrumentals are such that you can listen to the album all year round and thoroughly enjoy it, but it has that extra spark at Christmastime. In addition to the standard carols is “Linus and Lucy,” the absolutely hoppin’ song that’s since become the theme for all the Peanuts cartoons. You know the one: “BA ba bum badada BA BUM. BUM BA-BUM!” In short, swinging piano + Christmas carols + Charlie Brown = awesome yuletide excitement.

2. Beach Boys Christmas Album
Oh wow, those voices. The Beach Boys made the most heavenly noises in all of recorded music and so they can fill you with hopeful Christmas cheer better than just about anyone else. Here the singers turn in renditions of a few old favorites as well as a crop of originals, including the now classic “Little Saint Nick.” Kicking off the album is a stripped-down version of that song, superior to the more sleighbell laden single version released a year before. “Stripped-down” is a good way to describe this whole record; while the instrumentation is enjoyable and at times lush and even beautiful, it never gets in the way of the true stars of the show, those incredible voices. Side one of the album consists of more typical Beach Boys arrangements, but it’s on side two—perhaps more than in anything else the band ever did—that the well documented influence of the Four Freshmen is felt most strongly. The two styles are different, but they’re both absolutely phenomenal. My personal favorite cuts on the album are “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” and the Brian Wilson solo vocal performance on “Blue Christmas,” but really every track is a standout. Be sure to give this one a listen; plunk the needle down and let your ears be awash in the most gorgeous sounds in Christmas history. Man oh man will you ever be glad you did.

1. A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector
Not just the best rock and roll Christmas record, but the best Christmas record period. Featuring songs from Spector’s stable of artists (Darlene Love, The Ronettes, Bob B. Soxx and The Blue Jeans, The Crystals), it provides the ultimate Christmas package. As a producer, Spector was the undisputed master of making not just songs but records. Every cut on the album is given the famous Wall of Sound treatment, with music fairly bursting from every nook and cranny of these recordings. Horns, sleighbells and glockenspiels come at you with both barrels, it’s done in glorious monaural sound and it’s all over in thirty-five minutes. But they’re the best thirty-five minutes of Christmas music you’re going to find. Virtually all the secular standards are here, from “Sleigh Ride” to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” to “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” Perhaps the album’s crowning achievement is “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” which has become something of a mainstay in the years since this album’s release and which Darlene Love has made a second career out of singing each year on David Letterman. It’s a great album, from a time when people realized there was more to a record than just the song—there was also the sound, man. No Christmas collection is complete without this one.

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A weird flavor, snowflakes on the package and the phrase “limited time only” spell holiday edition to you, right? They sure do to me, and that’s why I feel justified in calling a pointless blog about Pomegranate 7Up a Christmas post. I have a pretty fierce obsession with Christmas editions of food. Christmas Crunch is perhaps the finest thing ever devised by cereakind. Slap Santa on the label and I’ll eat a can of Dinty Moore Hippo Anus In Its Own Juices. And so I must now sample Pomegranate 7UP, a thing that I would never ever try if it didn’t have those tantalizing snowflakes on the label. I have no idea what a pomegranate tastes like and I assumed I’d never find out. But the Christmas season, with its miracles and magicks, can surprise us all.

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Care to hear a dumb, semi-Christmas related story from my youth? Of course you do!

See, what happened was there was this Christmas play. Thankfully, I wasn’t actually in the play this time, I only acted as an observer. The particularly exciting thing about this play is that it wasn’t sanctioned by any school, church or other organization. Far from it. Rather, it was put on by my cousin and one of our friends—a friend who is the most creative, fearless and batshit insane person I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. A number of years have gone by and I can now remember almost none of the details of the play. But I do remember this much.

The main characters were some kind of tough, hip, urban folk named Jameela and Sinatra. But you have to say them as “JAM…eela” and “SIN…atra.” And they were having some kind of Christmas something or other. I don’t know what. I do know it involved fabric softener. You see, one of the characters, in true Grinch-y fashion, had stolen the other’s only Christmas present: A bottle of Downy fabric softener. This scenario gave rise to an immortal quotation, still quoted in my house to this very day:

Before long, laundry baskets and bottles of Downy were flying through the air like spring-fresh-scented meteors. I don’t have any idea what the point of all this was, unless it was all an elaborate excuse to throw things at people and call it theater. It’s possible that the whole play was some kind of statement on race relations, because I have some sort of recollection of a fight between the characters being prompted by some kind of racial slur. But I think the “excuse to throw things” explanation is a lot more likely.

In conclusion: I and my associates have always been really stupid, even around the holidays.

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